Join the Wait... What?! Campaign today, and stand up for equal rights!
Did you know your friends can be fired in 29 states, just for being gay? Surprised? So are lots of folks; equal rights are farther from reality than many of us would like to believe.
Today is the annual celebration of National Coming Out Day. Thousands of people across the country are standing up for their gay friends’ rights. You can add your voice by turning astonishment into action.
Through viral sharing on Facebook and Twitter, thousands of new voices will chime in to bring attention to equal rights issues like employment and housing discrimination. The movement has made great strides over the past year, year with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the passing of the marriage equality bill in New York, but there’s still much more to be done!
Friendfactor Founder Brian Elliot explains the campaign like this:
Not everyone realizes the full extent to which their gay friends are not equal: they can legally be fired and evicted in 29 states just for being gay. In 32 states, there’s zero protection from the law when gay friends are bullied. My straight friends are shocked when they learn these things, and we know other straight friends will be too. We believe there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage these friends and accelerate the pace of change for their gay friends.
With one share on Facebook or Twitter, you can join the team of celebrities — including Adam Lambert, Ke$ha, Cyndi Lauper, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Joan Rivers, Margaret Cho and Wendy Williams — who are standing up.
Want to know the freshest news your gay friends will be talking about this weekend? Look no further! You’re a few short blurbs away from seeming super tapped-in with the world in which your friends live. This week: the world doesn’t end when gay folks serve openly in the military, the freedom to marry receives bipartisan and overseas support, and SQUID. Yeah, that’s right, the octopus’s punchier cousin, right here with the other gay news for straight friends on the Friendfactor blog.
Words we never thought we’d read in the same sentence: Dick Cheney Gay Marriage Advocate. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as such a surprise; attitudes about gay rights are (to borrow a term from president Obama) “evolving” faster than any equal rights issue in the nation’s history, by some estimations. It was only a few months ago that support for marriage for gay couples inched over the line of becoming a majority position. A new AP Poll is now putting support at 53% across the U.S.
It’s not hard, with a little bit of empathy, to understand why marriage is so important to gay couples. The issue has been a political wedge for decades, but we’re seeing a heartening shift in the public dialogue: in the clip below, the Cheneys don’t talk about marriage in the abstract. They talk about their daughter, Mary, and her partner and children. As we continue to recognize that gay issues are really about the lives of gay people, more hearts and minds will change, paving the way for the legal equality we so desperately need.
What I see here are two loving parents and grandparents who have put politics aside because they see something more important happening. And what’s more, Cheney makes it clear that he hasn’t abandoned his ideology: for him, marriage equality is about the essential freedom all Americans are entitled to. A gesture like this has amazing potential to help this issue rise above partisan lines; if Dick Cheney can come out in support of marriage for gay couples, what’s preventing the rest of us?
Take Action: Share this post and video with your friends — let’s celebrate our culture changing to embrace marriage for all, and help the 44% still opposed see all we’re asking them to support is freedom and the gay people they already care about!
Gay marriage: you’ve read about it. Probably more than most other gay issues. Here’s why.
Gay or straight, we’ve all been brought up to understand that marriage is a central moment in our lives. Some folks may reject that premise in adulthood – and more power to them – but for a lot of us marriage is a major milestone, a change in identity to being a married person rather than still, in some sense, single. I’d put money down that you’ve put at least a little bit of thought into what your wedding might be like. Yes, you. But on top of all this cultural and spiritual meaning, marriage is an important legal status. Being married affects more parts of your life than you can shake a stick (or bouquet) at.
The freedom to marry is a big, big legal disparity to tackle for gay couples, but there are also lots of other incredibly pressing things that need to change in order for gay and straight folks to be equal under the law. This other stuff – employment discrimination, lack of housing protections, and second freedom from violence to name just a few – is vital for the health and well-being of gay Americans, and groups around the country are fighting for equality. Gay marriage is news largely because it’s an emotional issue. Love is a wonderful thing to rally around (getting fired for being gay is a real downer in comparison to potential weddings), plus there are 1,100 rights and protections associated with marriage. Your gay friends need them.
Marriage is the ultimate goal – not domestic partnerships or civil unions (more on these after the cut), and the Federal government and 44 states don’t recognize a gay couple’s right to marry. It has to change.
You certainly don’t have to have a prime-time standup special to help your friends win full legal freedoms… but it doesn’t hurt! On the two-month anniversary of New York legalizing marriage for gay couples, we wanted to give a shout out of sincere thanks to the comediennes and other inspiring stars who encouraged fans and friends to call legislators in the name of love.
During the great New York marriage debate of aught-leven (working on it), you may have noticed a relatively new breed of op-eds voicing support for marriage equality: the economists. Forget about freedom, love, all *ahem* men being created equal… there’s a dollars and cents argument to be made for expanding the wedding industry in your state. In a piece criticizing this trend run in the New York Times, Jaye Cee Whitehead writes:
States and cities are, as the New York executives pointed out, competing to attract talent in a globally competitive labor market. The wedding industry benefits, of course, when more couples are allowed to marry. And marriage equality is associated with revenue gains from sales taxes and license fees. Backers of gay marriage speak openly of the gains from “marriage tourism” in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.
The amount of money involved is not pocket change: the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, puts the economic gain in Massachusetts alone at $111 million in the five years since same-sex marriage was legalized there. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states would yield $1 billion in annual revenue over a 10-year period.
If you calculate those millions of dollars in pizzas (as we in the Friendfactor office sometimes like to do when struggling to conceptualize large sums of money)… legalizing the freedom to marry would allow for the purchase of many, many pizzas by New Yorkers. Is that the best argument for equality? Debatable. Would it hurt NY to attract that business/money/pizzas? Our position is a staunch “no.”
There’s a great story out of the Pam’s House Blend blog today that’s got us thinking about how we can all make daily decisions to support our gay* friends. Oyster.com recently ran a blog post recommending hotels for out of town couples coming to the Big Apple to tie the gay knot, as it were, and included a hotel owned by the notoriously homophobic Donald Trump (and if you think the hair is coincidental to the fact that The Donald doesn’t respect the gay folks in his life, you’ve got another thing coming). Pam petitioned Oyster to remove the Trump property from their list, and within the week they’d done just that.
A job very well done, but we say let’s take it a step further. With the wealth of independent businesses here in New York and around the country, I see no reason that my money should ever support people who don’t support my LGBT friends. It’s not always easy to know who the offenders are — who’d have thought the barnyard traitorous Chick-fil-A cows were also lousy Ffriends? — but if we can make a habit of spending with gay-friendly businesses instead of the other guys, we may just find that dollars speak louder than words.
Are there products or businesses you try to avoid (or seek out!) because you support your gay* friends? Share the knowledge in the comments!
Gay marriage passed in New York with the help of some unlikely allies. One of them was Republican Senator Stephen Saland, pictured here in front of what appears to be a very nice field of blurry flowers:
Now that is the smile of someone who supports his gay friends and definitely does not have pollen allergies!
“There was no magical moment where I blinked and all of a sudden the decision was made,” he said. “It as a long deliberative process.”
Saland also noted that his wife, Linda, played an important role in his decision.
Linda Saland has strongly supported gay marriage for years, he said. Advocates said they first felt confident the vote would pass when they say her show at the Capitol to watch an expected vote on the issue a day before it actually passed.
She wound up meeting with Gov. Cuomo hours before the vote on Friday.
“Most of the groups who came to lobby me in favor were either aware or made aware by me that they had someone in my house, my wife of nearly 46 years, who was certainly lobbying me on behalf of marriage equality,” Saland said.
Should Friendfactor introduce a new subsidiary, Wifefactor? Discuss in the comments, even though the answer is obviously yes!
In a New York Times op-ed on Saturday, Frank Bruni talks about how much gay rights have advanced since he was in college—when gay marriage wasn’t even talked about—and attributes the sea change to strong straight-gay friendships. In other words, friendship has been a factor. In other other words, Friendfactor!
In voicing his support for same-sex marriage, Mayor Bloomberg has mentioned — and appeared with — his niece Rachel, who is lesbian. “It brings it home,” he told me on the phone this week, though he added that beyond his desire for her to have everything she wants in life, “Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose.” He sees no such purpose in blocking same-sex marriage.
I asked Avery how he arrived at his support. He mentioned gay friends whose weddings he thinks it would be a blast to attend.
I asked Bratton. “My sister, Pat, is married to her partner in Massachusetts,” he said, adding that the two women have been together for decades and have a grown son.
In closing, I would like to point out how weird the New York Times author headshots are. Frank Bruni seems very nice, but his picture is lit so he looks like a cross between Voldemort and a racecar driver. In an abyss. Why? Discuss in the comments!
Congratulations, New York! In case you refuse to read any news source other than the Friendfactor blog, the freedom to marry bill passed Friday night, 33-29, just in time for Pride weekend. There’s a lot to say about marriage and Pride and Pride’s amazing synchronized flag twirling team (how were they SO GOOD?!), but I think a picture really is worth a thousand words in this case:
It’s the empire state building!
To keep the momentum from our New York win going, sign the Friendfactor pledge to help your gay friends in other states win marriage equality. Sign here! And once you’ve signed, share the pledge with your friends. We’re trying to get to 1,000 signatures. Ready, set… GO!
In his Thursday show, Keith Olbermann showed Obama’s latest stance on same-sex marriage (as stated at a Thursday LGBT gala), and then offered his personal comment on the gay marriage debate in New York.
Olbermann argues that, regardless of Obama’s position (which is currently “Let’s vote on gay marriage… and then like whatever comes out of that?”, followed by a sheepish smile), gay marriage is going to be universally legalized within a decade.
Olbermann attributes the increasing popularity of gay marriage to “an inability of younger people in this country to do what older ones still can: To pretend that this matters anymore. It just doesn’t. It won’t destroy the democracy. It doesn’t destroy the family. It strengthens the institution of marriage… and it increases the number of people living in stable and loving homes.”
Olbermann also suggests that people who are worried that children are endangered by gay parents should think again.
“The list of risks to children created by their parents is nightmarishly long, and standing there being all gay around them is probably no higher than 206.”
(This is, by the way, the best use of the phrase “being all gay” that I have ever seen. May #beingallgay one day trend on Twitter!)
Olbermann closed with some thoughts about corn, power, and feelings.
“This is, corny as it seems, not about politics or religions or power or lobbying. It is about love.”
What do you guys think of Obama’s stance on gay marriage? Has it evolved enough, or does he need to keep evolving? And most important of all: Is Olbermann’s last quote corny, or awesome? I vote awesome, but then again, my favorite movie is A Walk To Remember.
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